Ohio colleges get mostly low grades from National Council on Teacher Quality

U.S. colleges -- including those in in Ohio -- aren't doing a good enough job of preparing teachers to succeed with their students, according to a report from the National Council on Teacher Quality.Plain Dealer file

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- A controversial national report released Tuesday says that colleges and universities across the country are doing a terrible job of preparing their students to be teachers.

That was true in Ohio as well, where almost all the programs that were rated got fewer than three stars on the four-star scale used by the National Council on Teacher Quality.

Two graduate programs at Cleveland State University and one at Kent State University got zero stars, earning them a warning symbol from the council's "Teacher Prep Review."

Ohio State University, however, was at the top of the charts for its graduate programs for elementary and high school teachers.

Critics of the review say that it comes from an advocacy group biased against traditional schools of education and its design provides a poor measure of how well they're doing. Many private colleges – including all but a handful in Ohio – declined to provide the requested information because of their concerns.

But Kate Walsh, head of the Washington, D.C.-based council, said her group is hardly alone in finding the current way of educating teachers to be fundamentally flawed.

"Our strategy here is to create a consumer tool," she said. "The only way to really drive change is to use an informed consumer."

The report looked at 1,130 schools across the country but got enough information to calculate ratings for only 608 of them.

Walsh said the study used measurable standards to gauge how students are selected for teacher programs, how well they're prepared for teaching various subjects and how much practice they get before their first day on the job. "The results were dismal," she said.

The academic requirements for entering a school of education are often lower than what's needed to play on college athletic teams, she added. Prospective teachers don't get the knowledge and skills they need to be successful. And their student teaching experience is usually valuable only if they "lucked out and happened to get a great mentor."

Cheryl Achterberg, dean of Ohio State's education college, was pleased with its high ratings -- 3½ stars for the graduate program for elementary teachers and a rare four stars for the graduate program for high school teachers. But she wasn't exactly sure how the calculations were done.

"We submitted a lot of paperwork," she said. "They extracted whatever they extracted using methods we really don't know yet."

Achterberg added that the faculty has been hard at work for the past three years to completely rewrite the curriculum and coordinate across classes so that every course "relates to producing a great teacher."

Kent State's programs got one or two stars but none for the graduate program for high school teachers. That program has gotten positive feedback from the students and the teachers who supervise their student teaching, said Daniel Mahony, the education dean.

"We have issues with a lot of the standards they used because they're so rigidly applied," he said. For example, the council may have required 30 hours of certain courses, but a school would get no credit for requiring 29 hours.

Mahony said a report on teacher preparation from the Ohio Board of Regents, released in January, provides prospective teachers and employers with a much better gauge because it focuses on outcomes instead of policies.

"I've been here five years and I'm comfortable in saying those who go through our program are happy with it and do very well," he said. "For me, the proof of the quality of our program is in the graduates."

Jenny Cappuzzello is one of them. The Salem native graduated last year and just finished her first year of teaching fourth grade in the Mount Healthy district near Cincinnati.

"The people I work with told me I don't act like a first-year teacher, and others I know who went to Kent have heard the same thing," she said."

Cleveland State got one and two stars for its undergraduate programs but none for its two graduate programs. One of them, which prepares teachers for urban high schools, has won national awards, said Brian Yusko, an associate dean in the education college.

"We hold that program in high esteem," he said. "It's shocking that it would come out with significant weaknesses."

Yusko said he's still trying to figure out the reasons behind the low ratings, but he thinks at least part of the problem was the way questions were posed in the survey of schools.

"We responded the best we could," he said. "But the questions were not getting to the full picture of what we do in our programs, and there was no opportunity to add to that."